monday, february 27, 2006

Observer: Thousands of children at risk after computer fault

An Observer investigation has found that the child health information system, introduced last summer as part of the government's £7 billion IT programme, has derailed the country's entire vaccination programme, leaving health staff resorting to slips of paper to work out who needs immunising. Several women whose babies were stillborn have received letters asking them to take their babies for their first vaccinations.

more...
On the money
Saturday, February 25, 2006

The ace Matthew Norman on the crime of the century:

Myself -- not that I'd given a minute's thought to the matter before now, of course -- I'd take my five-million-pound cut, wait for a moonless night and head for the Normandy coast in a fishing boat. Airports, car ferries and especially Channel Tunnel trains are out of the question with All Ports Bulletins in effect throughout the land; but given a following wind and a bit of luck, a tiny fishing vessel should make the beach at Trouville or Honfleur undetected by French coast guards.

Once arrived, the next step would be to launder the money, very slowly, in the casinos to be found in every French coastal town. It's an old and well-known scam, but with caution it should be OK.

Whether the Tonbridge Mob will follow this blueprint is anyone's guess, but it will be the hope of us all that whatever laundering method they employ will fail, and that they are swiftly apprehended.

Then, as is traditional with major fiscal offences, they can spend twice as long in jug as they would have done for committing a couple of murders.

For the merest flavour of the "oh shit, what are we going to do now?" moment these villains must be experiencing at this minute in time, I heartily recommend the final episode of season two of the mighty, mighty, The Shield.

To fund their retirements, the frighteningly appealing bent cop/sadist/monster Vic Mackey and his knuckle-headed colleagues on LA's Farmington Precinct anti-gang Strike Team have robbed an Eastern European mob's "money train" of crime-supplied cash. Back at their hideout, they stand around the table admiring the Kilimanjaro of cash. One by one, their laughter dies as they realise the sheer enormity of their crime...
Nick Barlow: MIA
Saturday, February 25, 2006

Public Service Announcement: Anybody worried about the disappearance of Nick Barlow's blog should be reassured that it's merely a hosting problem which should be resolved once Nick's given his webhost the hairdryer treatment on Monday morning.
saturday, february 25, 2006

Jenni Russell: We are giving the authorities an open invitation to abuse their power

I fear that many of us are failing to see the danger we are now in, precisely because we have grown up in a largely benign state. We still trust in the good sense and reasonableness of its agents, and the rest of officialdom. We don't understand that that has been sustained only by the existence of our legal rights, and by a respect for our freedom of action. We don't see the lesson of every society: that if you do not place constraints on official power, its instinct is to grow. Our tolerant world is disappearing, and it is only when many more of us start running up against that reality that we will realise what we have lost.

more...
Broken Yoghurt?
Saturday, February 25, 2006

The estimable MatGB writes, regarding the Chicken Yoghurt template...

On post pages, the comments and text of entries flows all across the screen, so you can't read things, and the sidebar takes priority so I can't even highlight stuff.

He's using Firefox 1.5.0 on Windows XP. I use the same but everything looks fine to me. Would anybody else seeing anything strange (or not) with the site layout please shout out in the comments. Cheers.
I like this
Friday, February 24, 2006

From the comments:

[D]efined by the cousins over the water as the
Napolean-Clarke Law - "Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice"

Its origin lies in the elegant splicing of Napoleon's...

Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.

...and Arthur C. Clarke's Third Law...

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Expect to see it used here to the point of dispiriting cliche.
Telegraph: ID cards have already cost taxpayers £32m

The figures issued by Charles Clarke, the Home Secretary, in a Commons written answer, also show that spending soared in the second half of last year from £25,000 a day to £63,000 a day.

more...

George Monbiot: When it won't need a tyranny to deprive us of our freedom

At the end of last month, a leaked letter from Andy Burnham, the Home Office minister, revealed that the identity cards for which we will involuntarily volunteer will contain radio frequency identification chips. This will allow the authorities to read the cards with a scanner. I propose that as the technology improves, the police will be able to scan a crowd and (assuming everyone is carrying his voluntary-compulsory ID card) produce a list of whom it contains. I further propose that it will take only a year or two for this to seem reasonable.

more...

Washington Post: Leaving Las Vegas: So Long DefCon and Blackhat

Los Angeles-based Flexilis set the world record for transmitting data to and from a "passive" radio frequency identification (RFID) card -- covering a distance of more than 69 feet.

more...
International Herald Tribune: Ban on abortions is voted in South Dakota
After more than an hour of fierce and emotional debate, the senators Wednesday rejected exceptions for incest or rape or for the health of a mother and voted, 23-12, to outlaw all abortions, except those to save a mother's life.

(Via Warren Ellis and his Grim Meathook Future.)
Murphy's Law
Wednesday, February 22, 2006

When I finally succumb to the massive and catastrophic stress-induced brain embolism that is to be, no doubt, my final destination, the coroner will be able to pinpoint the exact time of my terrible and furious demise to whenever the pointless junior government minister, with a dangerous and unpopular piece of new law to sell, was interviewed on either the Today programme or PM that day.

This morning it was the turn of Jim Murphy, Parliamentary Secretary to the Cabinet Office, to usher me just that little bit closer to the big dirt bath. Murphy was the luckless soul sent onto the Today programme to defend the Furtherance of Unaccountable Government Bill.

For those just coming in, otherwise known as the The Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill, this harmless-sounding piece of proposed legislation has bothered those of us who think that our barely accountable public servants - along with our not at all accountable public servants - should be kept on a short lead.

This is arcane, hard to engage with stuff but nonetheless has some pretty far-reaching consequences should this new legislation's power fall into the wrong hands. It's about how we are governed and what those to who we lend power do with that responsibility. Put simply, the The Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill, as Marcel Berlins explained in the Guardian the other day, will make it...

...possible for the government, by ministerial order, without a debate in parliament, to create new criminal offences, punishable with less than two years imprisonment. It could also, according to Cambridge law professor John Spencer (who is not alone in his analysis), introduce house-arrest, give the police stronger powers of arrest and interrogation, set up new courts, and in effect re-write the rules on immigration, nationality, divorce, inheritance and the appointment of judges.

That's a pretty disturbing list, I hope you'll agree, particularly under this Government who are determined to be harder and nastier than anybody else when it comes to The War Against Terror. However, taking the basic premise that we're not dealing with Darth Vader and friends here, I think we can say that if/when this bill is passed into law, dissidents aren't suddenly going to find themselves locked in their homes with their knackers wired to the mains.

But this is to forget the law of unintended consequences and as I said the other day, when your thirst for efficiency, or for at least the facade of efficiency, produces the same outcome as if you'd set out to be a bastard, you can't really be too sore, in my opinion, if people start refusing to make the distinction. "I didn't mean to hurt you," often doesn't impress those on the receiving end. It's a trust thing.

Murphy, in his interview (RealPlayer required), did at least give a few a pointers as to what intentions lie behind the bill and just what the Government mean when they say they will place "safeguards" within it. As to why we need the bill, Murphy played his joker, otherwise known as the Armageddon Gambit. Don't argue your case on its merits, just scare the shit...

The real danger is what happens if we don't introduce a bill of this sort. We are trying to do all we can to maintain UK competitiveness, business competitiveness, economic growth, employment levels in a global economy where we face challenges from the emerging economies.

You hear that? If we don't get this bill, we'll be swept away by the Yellow Peril. Don't blame Jim when you're sewing Nike Trainers for a bowl of rice a day - it'll be those bastard urban intellectuals' fault for not letting him have his way.

So where's the pressure for this bill coming from? Here's the clue: UK competitiveness, business competitiveness, economic growth, employment levels. The "stakeholders" in this bill are the CBI, the Federation of Small Businesses, the Institute of Directors, British Chambers of Commerce.

Maybe paying a bunch of honking, low-wage conservatives massive salaries is all that stands between me and a third world lifestyle. I'm not a complete idiot, maybe British business is being choked by red tape. Frankly, I don't really care enough to find out, although anything that might make Digby Jones' life slightly less pleasant can't be all bad if you ask me.

But you would have thought that that Britain's business community would have had the law of unintended consequences closer to the front of their minds when they lobbied for this bill, particularly after Gary Mulgrew, Giles Darby and David Bermingham fell foul of the Extradition Act 2003. The CBI were sanguine about swarthy suspects being sent to Guantanamo under the act but less happy when it was applied to wholesome white collar types. Where's Martin Niemöller when you need to misquote him?

But all is well. There are safeguards to protect us:
The relevant select committees of the House of Commons will have a veto on every single proposal.

For those with rich and fulfilling lives who don't know what select committees are, here's how Charter88 defines them:

Select Committees of MPs carry out detailed investigations into policy matters and government performance, and produce detailed reports and recommendations. Sometimes they will draw up and recommend new legislation.

Hurrah, you cry, select committees will save us. Ah, well, Charter88 continue...

But there the Committees' powers end: they have no right to ensure that their reports or recommendations or proposed Bills are debated by parliament.

...and it gets worse...
Currently select committees, whose job is to investigate government actions and performance, are appointed by the government - i.e. the whips draw up the list which is then voted for en bloc in the House.

Members or select committees are placemen allocated according to the electoral makeup of Parliament. What if, and I know this is a cynical point of view, any scrutiny of new laws proposed by a government under this new power divided along party lines with the dominant (that is, government) party winning the day?

Regardless of party loyalties, however, it's still MP's faults that we need to give the Government power to do whatever it likes. As Murphy said:

We still have a one-size-fits-all approach to better regulation. So regardless of how controversial or the scale of a proposal, it still has to go through exacting parliamentary scrutiny which some times can take a number of years. That's not fit for purpose.

MPs. The lazy bastards. Clogging the arteries of the mother of parliaments. And on our dollar as well. But if that's the case - and Parliamentary scrutiny isn't always the constitutional bottleneck Murphy would have us believe - why does Andrew Miller, Labour MP for Ellesmere Port and Neston and chairman of the Commons Regulatory Reform Committee (on this occasion, granted, no placeman he) say:

Our report demonstrates that the current parliamentary procedures are not responsible for delaying regulatory reform orders.

Our evidence shows that departments themselves are slow in identifying the unnecessary regulations, in bringing the proposals for orders to Parliament and in making the orders once Parliament has made its recommendation on individual reforms.

Government departments. The lazy bastards. Clogging the arteries of the mother of parliaments. And on our dollar as well.

The interview's worth listening to if only to hear how little Murphy gave away. He's few bones to throw to the dogs on this one. Oh, and the - ha ha! - jokey exchange about Prince Charles - ha ha! - and his so-called dissidence right at the end, oh, it's a hoot.

So, as others have said it's time to do something. My MP doesn't answer my letters so I'm left whistling in the dark somewhat. Her voting record wouldn't inspire confidence even if I wasn't being ignored. So I charge you, dear reader, with the noble quest of rescuing democracy.

To conclude - with the requisite glib, broader point - in the nine years since they came to power New Labour have pretty much made it up as they went a long. That's what happens when you swap principle for power at any cost - the star you used to sail by is obscured by clouds and you have to guess where you're heading. There are no lighthouses. When Gordon Brown ascends to the throne he may find himself a Scot on the rocks.
Convergence
Monday, February 20, 2006

I understand that New Labour feels it must pander to the public's basest, most disgusting human instincts in order to consolidate its power. I realise only too well that the only way to stay at the top is by warming the cockles and stoking the fears of Daily Mail readers.

But I wonder if anybody (apart from say, Nick Griffin) feels the requisite glow of a job well done after hearing this:

Ms Blears, as well as being Minister of State for Crime, Security and Communities, is the constituency MP of Olive Mukaraguwiza, a Rwandan asylum seeker who, after living in the UK for three years, without warning found her home raided by police at 6am last Tuesday morning. She and her three children were packed off to Yarls Wood detention centre pending their deportation. On Friday they were bundled onto a plane in such a distraught state that the pilot refused to fly.

Did even the official who signed off on this think it was the right thing to do? Did he tick the box, go home for his tea and proudly tell his wife and kids what he'd done at the office that day? Did even Hazel Blears, a person who is never, ever wrong about anything ever, not feel a small wave of cold disquiet upon hearing this story? Did what's left of her humanity not itch, even a little?

As I said in the comments at Europhobia, I try very, very, hard not to believe that New Labour are actually evil. But doesn't this kind of petty, bureaucratic "efficiency" (ad nauseum) pretty much amount to the same thing?

It's time to show these people the door. You won't convince me the Tories would be any worse than this...
Chain of command
Friday, February 17, 2006

1 + 1 + 1 = 3...

1... Cabinet Office: New bill to enable delivery of swift and efficient regulatory reform to cut red tape
Cabinet Office Minister Jim Murphy today introduced a Bill to Parliament that would provide a swift and effective mechanism for delivering the Government's radical regulatory reform programme to cut red tape.

The Legislative & Regulatory Reform Bill aims to make it quicker and easier to tackle unnecessary or over-complicated regulation and help bring about a risk-based approach to regulation.

+ 1... Marcel Berlins: Why is the government seeking the power to pass far-reaching laws without parliament's approval?
Well, so what? We're only talking about minor, technical laws which don't raise any controversial issues, aren't we? No, we emphatically are not. Try this one. It will become possible for the government, by ministerial order, without a debate in parliament, to create new criminal offences, punishable with less than two years imprisonment. It could also, according to Cambridge law professor John Spencer (who is not alone in his analysis), introduce house-arrest, give the police stronger powers of arrest and interrogation, set up new courts, and in effect re-write the rules on immigration, nationality, divorce, inheritance and the appointment of judges. Yes, there are safeguards written into the bill supposedly to prevent this sort of dictatorial behaviour, but my experience of safeguards is that they look better on the page than they perform in practice.

+ 1...Charlie Whitaker: The tipping point?
If you have any remaining doubts that this government is opposed to democracy - opposed to popular representation, opposed to debate - now would be the time to discard them. The fact that this government has not recognised this bill for what it is - a proposal for major constitutional change that hugely empowers the executive - means that we should distrust them. Even if it turns out to be because of their ignorance, and not because of malign intent, we should distrust them. In a democracy, the government needs to demonstrate that it knows what democracy is: how it works, what it takes to sustain it. A government that fails that test is dangerous.

So what now? There is a lot of mud in the air: we need to prioritise. There are a lot of bad bills before parliament: this is the worst.

I think that an attack on parliamentary democracy trumps all former political prejudices: we should support any organisation that can effectively oppose this government within our democratic structures, and we should act. Today.

= 3... Not Little England: Getting New Labour out of office
The New Labour project started as a method of making Labour electable again, by bringing under control their less, shall we say, thoughtful, elements. In government, it has taken that controlling tendency further. It is taking control of our lives...
Hear no evil, see no evil
Friday, February 17, 2006

I know this is going to sound frightfully liberal - sandal-wearing or whatever witty epithet we're using at the minute - but this kind of thing bothers me:

BBC News: 'Dog whistle' to control youths
A high-pitched "dog whistle" device is to be used by police in north Staffordshire to stop groups of nuisance youths hanging around shops.

I suppose it's cheaper than a water cannon or a barrage of rubber bullets. It's literally the 21st Century's clip round the ear - it (hopefully) won't do them any harm. Most of the news outlets are treating this as a gleefully sadistic "and finally..." story. The fact is, this is yet another of those "tough on crime" while not giving a toss about "the causes of crime".

The inventor of the device was on PM on Radio 4 last night and he actually said, "...what about the human rights of the shopkeepers?" He'll go far that one, A New Labour peerage can't be far away. What about the nice children and their rights? What about the A-grade, never-said-boo-to-goose, model child sent out for a pint of milk?

Once upon a time latchkey kids were something to be pitied, now they're a control group for technocratic social engineering. Never mind why these children are hanging about, let's just corral them like animals. Why not give them collars that explode if they stray into a designated area as in the movie Battle Royale?

Adults can't hear the siren, although I bet the technology could be adapted to drive off, oh I don't know, let's say unauthorised protesters around Parliament. I wonder how easy it would be adapt the technology so that instead of emitting a high-pitched whistle it sent messages, "CONSUME. OBEY. PROCREATE. BE CONTENT."

We've been shown, most recently in the Tory leadership campaign, that age and experience are embarrassing liabilities. We're also told to fear the youth - hooded, rutting, drug addicts that they are. It seems the only age worthy of respect is complacent, condescending, comfortable, careerist middle age. And yet look at the carnage the forty- and fifty-somethings have caused since 1997. Won't anybody think of the children?
Lies, damn lies and Peter Hain
Friday, February 17, 2006

If you've got a spare hour, and if you didn't watch it last night, I recommend you have a look at this week's edition of Question Time online (it'll be there until this time next week), if only to see the feckless Peter Hain taking a kicking.

At some points it was painful to watch, the other four panellists, the audience and even the arch establishment figure David Dimbleby queued up to lamp him. It was like a bunch of squaddies taking their frustrations out on an Iraqi teenager. He didn't give up much of a fight.

You have to wonder what really goes through the mind of a former anti-Apartheid firebrand when he has to (half heartedly) defend ID cards, house arrest and extraordinary rendition. It doesn't take a huge leap of imagination to know what Hain's reaction would have been had, in 1970, the South African government put Nelson Mandela on a plane to Algeria to have information beaten out of him.

But as fun as was to watch this abject turncoat take his licks, he was also guilty of peddling this to defend ID cards:

Look at the 7/7 terrorists, they had multiple identities, as many as 12.

I wonder where that came from because, try as I might, I can't find any mention anywhere of the July 7 bombers having used multiple identities. The nearest I can find is this, from Andrew Marr's interview with Gordon Brown on February 12:

I mean most of these terrorists we're talking about have about 12 identities, they operate multiple identities and false identities.

And, as has been repeated over and over (particularly by me), Charles Clarke himself said that ID cards would not have prevented the the July bombings. I doubt whether Hain will ever be picked up on this but for thousands of people watching Question Time last night, the seed will have been planted. It'll be interesting to see if it surfaces anywhere else, from whose mouth, and if anybody challenges it.

(I could quite easily spend a day dissecting the evasions, equivocations, misdirections and, yes, downright lies, that Hain put across last night - on glorification of terrorism, on how ID cards won't be compulsory without a further act of parliament, on why the British government won't help the British residents still in Guantanamo Bay - but you have to wonder what the point would be. I'd be that little bit more pissed off, you'd be that little bit more pissed off and it's such a sunny day and everything. The level of deception at which this government operates that becomes apparent to even a halfway attentive observer is amazing. Just what Hain got away with in one hour of a TV show, despite his mauling, well, you have to salute him for it really.)

I guess the identity theft/fraud angle on ID cards has failed to catch the public imagination so the prevention of terrorism aspect has to be bigged up again. It went away for a bit - so much so that the Prime Minister did not use the T word once in his defence of ID cards at Prime Minister's Questions on January 18 - but now it's back. Fear sells - Gordon Brown, in his hard man speech to herald the arrival of the "dual premiership", used the words "July 7" seventeen times.

It's said that the New Labour project lifted, wholesale, policies and their way of conducting business from the Clinton administration. In this technique of embracing the politics of fear, it's obvious New Labour have picked up a few things from Clinton's successors as well.

Bloomberg: U.K.'s Blair Wins Vote on Glorification of Terrorism
The government scheduled the terrorism vote for the same day that 20 people received honors at Buckingham Palace from Queen Elizabeth for helping to rescue victims of the July 7 terrorist attacks in London. When the Commons last took up the bill, in November, the vote was scheduled for the day after the memorial service for victims. Blair's spokesman Tom Kelly described that as a "complete coincidence."
Continuing the "isn't technology crap" theme I'm warming to this week - and this one is for bloggers only - is there anybody else who finds Technorati (or "Sorry - We couldn't complete your search because we're experiencing a high volume of requests right now" as I like to call it) a massively overhyped curate's egg?

The Guardian Glyn Moody seems to like it but to be honest I've stopped using it. The javascript users can put on their blogs to link to Technorati is moody, the stats on any given blog are slow to update (and, I suspect, inaccurate) and the functionality itself is up and down like a bride's nightie (and like on a Victorian wedding night, it's mostly down - "Sorry..." doesn't seems to be the hardest word). And you have to be seriously anal to get any hits in return from "pinging", laboriously hand-coding "tags", standing on one leg in field at midnight smeared in cat's blood, or whatever convoluted method you have to use this week to gain one or two extra visitors.

If you really want to know what others are saying about you, you'd be better off subscribing to the RSS feed via Bloglines of Google's Blog Search's result for your blog (put "link:your blog's url" into the search engine to see who's linking to you). Either that or check your visitor stats once a day. Or actually writing something people might want to read rather than spending your precious time trying to second guess, what is in effect, a glorified speed-dating system. It's much, much less irritating than repeatedly hitting F5 every thirty seconds on Technorati in the hope that enough coal's now gone in the furnace to supply the energy to tell you that nobody's linked to you today.
Don't be too proud of this technological terror you've constructed
Tuesday, February 14, 2006

So we're in the big Tesco in Hove this morning picking up a few bits. In the store, they have those cashier-free cashier desks that allow you to scan your own shopping, feed your money into the machine and leave without so much as clapping eyes on a member of staff. All very convenient. All very "Tea. Earl Grey. Hot."

Except. Except. The computer system is of such glacial ponderousness, the bar code scanner is so temperamental, the touch screen that allows you to key in how many packets of lard and cans of budget lager you're buying is so unsensitive, the "jolly" splosh! noise the machine makes when you scan an item is so ulcer inducing, that by the time I was feeding my twenty pound note into the machine - like trying to stuff a marshmallow into a test tube - I was on the verge of going Krakatoa. From soup to nuts the whole transaction took at least three times longer than if we'd gone to a human cashier and the stress it induced has probably shortened my life by considerably more.

And then realisation. Which didn't help my temper. The machines aren't there to make the customer's shopping experience any more quicker, more easier, more pleasant or any less dispiriting or less soulless or less "In the low-ceilinged canteen, deep underground, the lunch queue jerked slowly forward". They're there so Tesco doesn't have to employ so many drones with all the overheads that that entails. It's about buying yet more fur-trimmed solid jade commodes for the corpulent amoral shysters at the top of the tree.

I'd be tempted to try and comfort the rest of us by saying they can't take it all with them when they're finally dragged screaming to the new and exciting circle of Hell that's currently being built for them*. But in my darker moments I think that they've probably worked out a way to do it. I bet when the likes of the chairman of Tesco or Digby Jones or Tony Blair or Polly Toynbee are inducted into The Greater Good, right after they've had their HIV/AIDS and bird flu vaccinations and been measured up for their jetpacks, they're shown the teleport technology - powered, literally, by the sweat of the lower classes - that will allow them to send their wealth into the afterlife.

I think the reason nothing works in this country - trains always late, government computer systems always vastly overdue lemons, our troops dangerously and criminally undersupplied in battle, and the rest of the fourth-largest-economy-in-the-world-my-arse incompetence - is that the cream of the scientific community have been commandeered for the likes of building said teleporter or making Blair's hair just the right shade of Statesman Grey or making Digby Jones look just that little bit less smug (you should have seen him before the £600m was spent).

Welcome to the 21st Century.

*The bastards have probably got a nice, fat, dripping slice of the PFI pillage being used to build it.
the blog and code
Monday, February 13, 2006

I was going to post a long and bad-tempered tract about Gordon Brown and how his so-called and much-vaunted enormous intellect has been little in evidence today. That was until Tim Ireland unveiled BlogCode and distracted me.

That's two things you should be thanking him for. Anyway, it's very groovy. Go see.
Right to vote
Monday, February 13, 2006

A Fistful of Euros have opened the polls on their 2nd European Weblog Awards. Get along and have a look.

Me old mucker Nosemonkey gets a well-deserved brace of nominations as does The Sharpener, my second home.
Craig Murray: Murder in Samarkand: The FCO prepares for legal action

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office seem determined to stop me publishing my book. They are threatening four grounds of legal action:

a) Libel
b) Crown Copyright
c) Breach of Confidence
d) Official Secrets Act

The first point is that plainly this is an attempt to suppress the book and prevent publication by scaring me (and the publishers) with the threat of legal action. This will not work, as neither of us scare easily...
Conspiracy theory
Monday, February 13, 2006

BBC News: Blair to miss key ID cards vote
He had been due to return from a summit in Pretoria, but his flight was aborted on take off when the pilot spotted a problem with one of the engines.

Engine trouble. Being of a somewhat cynical mien, my immediate thought was: Yeah, right. I wonder if the Whip's Office, finally getting its act together, has been in touch. "Don't come home. We don't have enough bodies to win the ID card vote. You'll have lost a vote you personally stamped your authority on."

Or, of course, it could have been: "No need to rush back, it's in the bag".
Britblog Roundup # 52
Sunday, February 12, 2006

The first anniversary Britblog roundup is up. The best posts of the year as chosen by Tim are also there.

On top of that, Tim's put 2005:Blogged online here.
The case for the Defence Secretary
Saturday, February 11, 2006

Whatever else you can say about Defence Secretary John Reid, he gives good value in an interview. You can imagine that even when he says "I love you", it's hissed through gritted teeth. King Rat in panto beckons.

Nosemonkey, Charlie Whitaker and Jamie K have picked up on Reid and his cry of "let us match savagery with savagery" on Radio 4's Today programme the other day.

What was interesting was that Reid brought the subject up completely unprompted and in relation to the current brouhaha over those bloody cartoons.

We need a dialogue internationally as well as domestically because if we're going to adopt the standard of sensitivity towards various religions, which I believe we should do, it has to apply to all religions. And we can't on the one hand have people demanding that we apply standards which they themselves want to see applied continually but they don't apply them themselves. Now, let me make one final comment on that, which is specific to British troops as it happens. Similarly, we cannot continually have an assymetric, uneven battlefield for our troops where we are facing an enemy unconstrained by any legality, any morality, any international convention and at the same time subject our troops to a level of scrutiny, accountability, media intrusion, questioning and every conceivable opportunity to criticise. So I say, in that kind of world, where we're facing that kind of enemy, let us be very slow to condemn our troops, our forces, and very quick to support them and understand them.


For the record, the interviewer, Jim Naughtie, gave what I thought was a craven response:

Yes, but political judgements must be made about the wisdom of the leaders who do things with the troops.

But then he probably had a script to get through and Reid going off reservation probably rattled the titan of British political journalism. High politics is a much safer area of discussion than low blows, after all.

I thought it was quite the leap between cartoons and abuses by UK troops. Still, it was obviously preying on Reid's mind. It's almost as if he's saying, if you want us to respect your religion you need to accept that our lads may want to give one or two of you a kicking now and again and be expected to get away with it. And you know, he's probably got a point.

Imagine Baha Mousa. As the blows rained down and the eternal darkness folded around him, no doubt his final thoughts were, "In this kind of world, I must be very slow to condemn these troops." Picture Ahmad Jabbar Kareem. As he slipped beneath the water for the third and final time, no doubt in a last moment of clarity he said to himself, "let no-one be in any doubt, the rules of the game are changing."

This passage from Reid puzzles me though:

And we can't on the one hand have people demanding that we apply standards which they themselves want to see applied continually but they don't apply them themselves.

Who does he mean here? Are the Iraq insurgents and suicide bombers demanding to be treated under the terms of the Geneva Convention? Does he mean those in Guantanamo Bay (some, if not many, of who may be innocent)? Or George Galloway? Or is it a straw man? How about Omar Khayyam? Khayyam is clearly an idiot but I didn't see him applying blunt force trauma to a man with his hands cuffed behind his back. (He didn't look much like a suicide bomber to me either. Maybe it's just me but I thought he looked more a like an uncertain just-out gay man, with a thing for Jean Claude Van Damm, trying to fit in at a provincial gay club.)

Is Reid advocating that we be lenient on soldiers who stray from the path of righteousness? So much for hearts and minds on the ground and ideals of justice. Earlier in the same interview Reid said:

There will be blemishes, there will be abuses, I have no doubt that occur. But the difference will be this, Jim: When abuses took place in the past, when these sorts of things by the Iraqi government or others took place under Saddam Hussein they were covered up, now they'll be exposed. The perpetrators were promoted. Now they will be prosecuted.

How to reconcile Reid's two statements? We must prosecute the perpetrators of abuses while being slow to condemn them. That would make for some interesting sentencings in murder cases:

Judge: Slasher McGee, you have been found guilty of eating your wife. While I sentence you to life imprisonment without parole for this crime, I will not in any way condemn it.

Of course, Reid didn't have our lads in mind. He meant Iraqis who beat and degrade, not - as consensus dictates - the "few" "bad apples" in the liberating forces. I suppose it becomes easier to understand when you remember that these statements come from a man who can argue the merits of firebombs over napalm. Reid can believe six morally reprehensible things before breakfast. In order to save Iraq it was necessary to put a bag over the head of a hotel receptionist and beat him to death.

"In the long run democracy is far more stable than a dictatorship," said Reid. There are those who would disagree. Israel's Shin Bet security service chief for starters. But what we bleeding hearts and fetishists for the rule of law forget is that while we've installed democracy in Iraq, if the harbingers of that democracy want to use a few tactics borrowed from the deposed regime to make their life easier and - if we're going to be honest here - to pass the time, it's all for the Greater Good. Be slow to condemn.

In the interview Reid also paraded his so-called intellectual credentials when he said, with regard to the current chaos in Iraq:

I've used before the old expression "pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will"

The expression is from Antonio Gramsci, reputedly a favourite of Reid's. It would have gone over many listeners heads (including this one's), had Peter Hitchens, who featured in the item on the contemporary relevance of the Far Left, straight after Reid's interviews, not blown the whistle. It's a phrase Reid's fond of, using it over and over and over. Reid's been in many a hopeless situation - Health, Northern Ireland, Defence - but he'll fight and he'll win. He'll dream the impossible dream.

It's a typical New Labour trait poking above the surface: take something potentially engaging and inspiring, rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat, until it's reduced to a platitude. Like a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy of the Mona Lisa. Of course, quoting Gramsci makes him sound much cleverer and better read than if he'd said "many a mickle makes a muckle" or "you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs" (which, in the various contexts Reid has used the Gramscian line, aren't a million miles away semantically.) The thing is, New Labour rhetoric is like the chimp you put in a suit and teach to eat with a fork. It's very impressive - but he's still a chimp when the bill arrives.

It turns out that Gramsci was quite the clever guy and still speaks to us from beyond the grave via the medium, Madame Google. No doubt, in the cases of Baha Mousa and Ahmad Jabbar Kareem, Reid could bring another tenet of Gramsci to bear:

He who by profession has become a slave of trivial details is the victim of bureaucracy.

Personally, I prefer:

The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned.

That would truly be something to aspire to although, I think, beyond the likes of me. Immediately, this might be a more useful one to adopt and try to live by:

My practicality consists in this, in the knowledge that if you beat your head against the wall it is your head which breaks and not the wall... that is my strength, my only strength.

Update: In his own piece about Reid's appeal for see-no-evil, Nosemonkey said:

So, what's going on? Has Reid got wind of another Abu Ghraib-style war crime? Is he trying to cut something off at the pass?

It looks very much as if Reid was...

BBC News: MoD to probe Iraq 'abuse' video
Pictures from a video allegedly showing British soldiers brutally beating a group of Iraqi teenagers have been published by the News of the World.

I feel like Bill Hicks in that, in a reverse of the perceived wisdom from the anti-war crowd, I'm for the occupation but increasingly against our troops. I'm not sure I agree with Nosemonkey in his reaction to the NOTW story:
No one could have predicted the massively over the top response to publishing those crappy cartoons. The News of the World was and is fully aware of the potential for a violent response in publishing this story. Yet they went ahead and ran it anyway, putting British troops in further danger, isolating them further from the average Iraqi. In a regular wartime situation, that could be considered tantamount to treason.

It's those troops who will be to blame if this comes home to roost, those beating Iraqis and "kicking a dead Iraqi in the face" for not much more than shits and giggles. It would be amazing if stories of beatings at the hands of British soldiers weren't already doing the rounds in Basra and, in the nature of embellishment in the telling, weren't less lurid than the story in today's papers. And it's not like this is the first time British soldiers have kept souvenirs. The detainee's been out of the bag for a little while now.

But at least we now know what Reid meant when he said in his Radio 4 interview:

And we can't on the one hand have people demanding that we apply standards which they themselves want to see applied continually but they don't apply them themselves.

It looks like he meant the Murdoch press. At least that's one mystery solved. Go get 'em John. I look forward to him raining fire and brimstone on an institution he'll be abasing himself in front of come election time.
Back soon
Friday, February 10, 2006

Family, the need to do some proper money-earning work, not to mention a beer festival at my local this weekend, are preventing me from writing anything right now.

Enjoy this brief, merciful respite while you can.
New Toy
Monday, February 06, 2006

Link to Podcast (RSS feed) for this blogI found this via Warren Ellis. It'll probably wear thin pretty quickly but it's of a passing novelty value.

The "Listen to this article" link at the bottom of each post will download an MP3 of that post being read by a lady computer. Anybody who doesn't glaze over after listening to the voice for more than a minute can subscribe to the podcast feed with this link.
Further to this...

Kitty Killer: Matthew Boulton: Assed and Daniel lose their appeal, suffer permanent expulsion
The Panel is satisfied that the penalty imposed reflects the offence caused by your actions and is designed to protect both staff and students. Members are aware that the decision to dismiss your appeal is not the one you will have wanted but you are urged to accept the outcome and seek advice on how you can continue your studies elsewhere.
Britblog Roundup # 51
Monday, February 06, 2006

...is up over at Tim's place.
The politics of the workhouse
Friday, February 03, 2006

Well stripe me pink. In the face of all the odds, Margaret Hodge answered one of my questions in her Webchat on the proposed Incapacity Benefit reforms.

Margaret, you plan to take one million people off incapacity benefits. Where, do you think, will those jobs come from?

Now unfortunately, her answer wasn't as thoroughgoing as the one provided by Unity...

Actually a million off incap in 10 years is perfectly achieveable.

Remember these are government targets and therefore not quite what they appear.

Around 850,000 will come of incapacity benefit in the next 10 years without the government doing anything - that's the number due to retire over that period, most of whom are people, men in particular, whose working life ended when Thatcher rips the guts out of British manufacturing.

That leaves 150,000 to find, give or take the mortality rate - some of theme are genuinely sick y'know.

Thw real squeeze will be on keeping new claimants off long-term incap to begin with - once someone's been on there for more than two years they're next to unemployable anyway. A sweep will pick up a few lazy twats along the way, but the real push will be on people in those first two years, especially those with 'soft' illnesses like depression.

To be honest, I'm not sure what I was expecting. The slim, naive hope that to have one of my questions answered would push out an astroturfer proved vain. I got the "aren't we great" answer an astroturfer would have expected:

Margaret replies: We have been very successful in our stewardship of the economy and have enjoyed consistent and steady growth since 1997. There are now 2.3 million more people in work today than there were in 1997. I'm always talking to economists and other experts about the prospects for jobs and most people are very confident that we will continue to grow jobs in Britain. That doesn't mean that people have a job for life today as they were used to in the past. Some of the old industrial jobs have gone but new markets, new businesses and new jobs are always emerging. So today we see more jobs in the service industries and in places like health and education.

The translation is either "I don't know" or "I could tell you but you're not going to like it". "Service industries" sounds like call centres, shelf stacking and McJobs to me. Piano tuning for the blind. I'd also be interested to know what jobs she has in mind in the health and education sectors. I may be being overly cynical but I doubt they'll be on the fulfilling end of the scale.

That's why I'd never make it as a politician. I'm too romantic, too utopianist, too naive. When I say I want people to be empowered I mean I want them to be happy and fulfilled. I spent years in a job that made me at first miserable and in the end unwell. I'd spare others from that if I could.

I was struck by what Chris Williams said in Jamie Kenny's comments, that, with this Government, we are dealing with...

[t]he self-made (wo)man can never quite understand why the rest of us didn't make it up the greasy pole.

When Tony Blair says he want to empower people you suspect he means making sure their hamster wheels fits just right. You suspect he's never enjoyed the thrill of an illicit sickie and is suspicious of those who have.

It's the same with Charles Clarke. When, as Education Secretary, he said he thought medieval history was "ornamental" and learning for its own sake as "a bit dodgy" he managed to sum up the New Labour ethos in one contemptible, misanthropic gobbet. A man of his narrow, unimaginative outlook couldn't square those activities with the overriding "modern" concept "human capital".

Anybody with an ounce of romance in their soul or interest in the human race and how it ticks (ie, anybody outside the New Labour project) should have been horrified. That's New Labour for you. They're done with history. They've put it behind them. But as the old adage goes, those who do not learn from history are like the dog with nothing more on its mind than wanting to hump your leg: doomed to repeat themselves until somebody hits them.

Now, even I'm not that naive that I can't see that we simply must have someone on the end of the phone when we need to check our bank balances at two in the morning, just as I know there will be blood on the streets if we're prevented from being able to buy a carton of milk at midnight. I know we need people to do the mundane. I also know that initiatives like Pathways to Work are nothing to do with empowerment and allowing people to "liberate their talents".

Isn't there an interest in a more contented working population with all the attendant benefits to business of lower staff turnover and higher staff morale (and higher revenues for the Treasury) as well as being able to strike people off the list marked "Dosser" and putting them on the list marked "Drone"? Or am I being utopianist again? Or Chauncey Gardiner?

I know from experience that the welfare system isn't geared to helping people with aspirations beyond menial jobs. It's barely geared to helping people full stop. When my IT career ran into the sand and I fell into the clutches of the Department of Work and Pensions, desperate for advice and guidance, I beat my head against institutionalised apathy and ignorance. I didn't see one adviser for six months - she was off sick - and there was nobody else with her knowledge to help or so I was told. Another adviser told me that he wasn't in a position to explain the tax credit system to me because, although he'd been on the training course, "it was boring and I can't remember any of it". (I was also told that newspaper are classed as a luxury. And they wonder why the poor are disenfranchised - but that's a story for another time.)

When I finally decided I would embark upon a new career and go back to school to study journalism, you should have seen the glazed expressions I met from the civil service's finest. They wouldn't have been any more befuddled if I'd announced that I'd hit upon exposing myself to children as a brilliant money making scheme. Those with career aspirations, those who set their sights a little bit higher, are regarded as freaks.

The system breaks down. The benefits couldn't be transferred to my partner while she took care of the kids and I studied (the course was more than sixteen hours a week which, while it didn't class as work, didn't class as job-seeking either and that meant I was no longer entitled to benefits) because I, and only I, was the "client". Help with course fees and materials was a no as well. We scraped and begged and borrowed instead.

I would say many people who are unemployed or on IB want a career, to stretch themselves, to go home happy that they haven't wasted the quality hours of their lives doing a job they hate. To my mind, however, those who want to escape their circumstances while realising their aspirations are best served cutting out the middle man and doing it under their own steam.

That's if they're educated, wilful and resourceful enough and determined not to be brought low by a system that doesn't give a shit. I'd suggest that many on Incapacity Benefit (and indeed, Jobseeker's Allowance) won't have those resources to draw on.

Much is said of New Labour's doctrine that divides the poor into the Deserving and the Undeserving. The Undeserving should get nothing we're told. As someone who's been at the sharp end let me tell you, under this lot, the Deserving don't get much more other than badly designed, incompetently implemented and cruelly-apathetically operated sops to middle class consciences and are told they should be grateful for it.

I'm white, middle-class, educated and earned a considerable salary in the year before I was made unemployed. It only takes a couple of twists for you to find yourself at rock bottom and it's a long, soul-destroying climb back. I'm surprised, given the way our system works, more people don't fall through the cracks completely. People with contempt, either implicit or explicit, for the poor would do well to remember that. The unemployed aren't all sitting in the park with bottles of cider or watching Richard & Judy, and many of them don't want to settle for minimum wage drudgery.

You'll be surprised to hear I don't share Margaret Hodges' optimism. I hope anybody on Incapacity Benefit with dreams of more than shelf stacking won't either.
Robert Newman: It's capitalism or a habitable planet - you can't have both
We are caught between the Scylla and Charybdis of climate change and peak oil. Once we pass the planetary oil production spike (when oil begins rapidly to deplete and demand outstrips supply), there will be less and less net energy available to humankind. Petroleum geologists reckon we will pass the world oil spike sometime between 2006 and 2010. It will take, argues peak-oil expert Richard Heinberg, a second world war effort if many of us are to come through this epoch. Not least because modern agribusiness puts hundreds of calories of fossil-fuel energy into the fields for each calorie of food energy produced.
To the death, I suppose
Thursday, February 02, 2006

From Slinging Ink, on the naughty cartoon apocalypse:

We therefore call on free-thinking bloggers everywhere to post the images on their sites and, through sheer weight of numbers, defeat those who would deny us our right to freedom of expression. We also request the that the companies that host these blogs do not capitulate to this 21st century inquisition. In particular we expect the British government to respect the vote that was passed in the House of Commons not two days ago.

I'll provide links to the cartoons but I'm not going to reproduce them here, for the same reason I don't post Bernard Manning jokes: I think they're shit.

Some of these cartoons barely pass as art let alone satire. Some of them, in my opinion, are making no other point than attempting to be deliberately inciteful. It's a taste thing, I suppose. If they'd been clever and made me laugh I'd have posted them.

This whole thing is the equivalent of Little Johnny being given detention because he drew a knob on his pencil case (which is actually funnier than these cartoons). It's childish, it's puerile but the seas didn't boil and the skies didn't rain blood. The people who drew some these cartoons are arseholes but, in what we laughingly call our liberal society, we must defend their right to be arseholes. So scribble away lads, somebody, somewhere must find you funny.

And, whatever your faith, if it's not up to withstanding a few rubbish drawings or a sweary opera, then your god clearly isn't as great and powerful as you keep telling us he is. What exactly are you frightened of? Get a bloody grip, eh?
A bridge too far
Wednesday, February 01, 2006

You know, as much as I'm against the war in Iraq and as much as Euan Blair's privileged progression through life gives infuriating lie to his father's ridiculous claims that we all live in a meritocratic society, I can't help but wonder what the point of the likes of this is:

Pte Phillip Hewett was the same age as Euan Blair but while the Prime Minister's son was celebrating a 2:1 at Bristol University, the 21-year-old soldier was returning home for his funeral.

Phillip Hewett's death is a terrible thing, that goes without saying. But the last time I looked the army was staffed by volunteers. It's not like Euan's daddy pulled some strings so the boy could dodge the draft, is it?

And we wonder why the anti-war movement is shafted. I never really got the "why don't these warmongers send their children to fight?" schtick. Instead of asking why rich boys don't go to war, wouldn't we be better served by asking why poor boys do go to war (the clue's in the question).

I'm not sure suggesting that the Prime Minister's son should be shitting bricks on the streets of Basra elevates the argument in our favour. Wishing death or injury on our leaders' children certainly isn't a cable car to the moral highground.

Update: John Harris in The Guardian...

His first spell in the army, including tours of duty in Northern Ireland and Kosovo, lasted until March 2004, when, after a spell in Basra, he decided to leave. He had met Sarah McLaren, a local girl who was now pregnant, and he had resolved to stay in Glenrothes. "He left to be with her," says Martin. "He was a young guy, maybe a bit paranoid, thinking, 'What will she be up to if I'm in Iraq or wherever?' But as soon as he was out, he thought, 'Why did I do that?'"

...

After three months living on benefits, he decided to return to the army. "He knew he was going back to Iraq," says Martin. "I said, 'Scott - why are you doing it?' He said, 'I'm fed up not being able to get a job that's satisfying.' Sarah was pregnant, and they were planning to get married, and they wanted to have a financial future for the kid.

"As strange as it might sound, I had an inkling he was never coming back that day, when I said goodbye to him. I was never emotional with him, and that day I was. He never had much money, 'cos he was living off the dole. So I gave him money for him and his missus to go and have a meal and make his last night a night to remember. And I said it to someone that evening: 'I doubt we'll see Scott again.'"
A bunch of notables for anybody fancying a change of scene...

The Federation of American Scientists have launched a couple of blogs: Secrecy News, which is a mirror of Steven Aftergood's estimable Secrecy News email newsletter, and the Strategic Security Project Blog, which is going to cover all kinds of goodies such as nuclear weapons, arms control and biosecurity.

I found the PhysOrg mailing list via Warren Ellis' site. It details what's hot in science, physics and space and is great for the occasional "they can do what now?" moment.

PS. This is the greatest achievement of human endeavour. It's the end of history. Pack up and go home everybody.

Try it, it's life affirming. When the cataclysm finally strikes and those of us who survive are eking out our miserable, brutal existence in the Arctic Circle, it will come as huge consolation when you remember you once got the best Doctor Who to ring your Mum and Dad to tell them you loved them.